The Christmas Gamble

by Sienna Ciles

  “No, I used condoms with her, every time. I don’t have anything,” Brandon said. “I just wanted to talk to you and see if we could work things out.”

  “Work things out?” I looked around the lobby and reminded myself that I didn’t need to cause any kind of scene. I took a deep breath and pitched my voice a little lower, a little quieter. “There is absolutely nothing to work out, Brandon.”

  “You didn’t even hear my side of the story,” Brandon whined.

  “There is no ‘your side’ of the story,” I pointed out. “You cheated on me. There’s nothing for you to defend.”

  “It was a mistake! I was scared, and I thought you were going on all these trips because you weren’t satisfied with the way things were at home. Really, it’s kinda your fault,” Brandon said.

  I pulled the phone away from my ear and stared at the screen. Had he really just tried that? Tried to blame his cheating on me?

  “You took a girl home, Brandon,” I said, pressing the phone to my ear again. “You flirted with her, you decided to hook up with her. And the way the two of you had clothes all over the apartment, it wasn’t her first time coming over. I cannot believe that you would make your cheating my fault.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” Brandon protested. “What I meant was I made a stupid mistake because I felt insecure.”

  “That’s at least a little more honest,” I said wryly. “It doesn’t change the fact that of all the stupid mistakes you could have made, you chose to cheat on me.”

  “It’ll never happen again, I swear,” Brandon said.

  “No, it won’t,” I agreed. “Because I’m not going to give you a chance to do that to me again.”

  “I hate myself for what I did,” Brandon told me. “I swear, Kayla. I know I did wrong, and I know I made a huge mistake. How could I have possibly stepped out on you?”

  “You know, there was a point when I asked that question, too,” I said, almost laughing in my bitterness. “I wondered. I wanted to know. But you see, I came up with an answer: it’s because you’re no better than a worm.”

  “I swear I can be a better man, Kayla,” Brandon insisted. “I can be good to you. You know, before you found out about this happening, you had no idea. I wasn’t treating you badly. And now that I know... now that I’ve learned from my mistake, I can be even better to you than before.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I said, shaking my head. “You were treating me badly by cheating on me. Nothing else you did at the same time even matters. You were sleeping with another woman. Making me breakfast that one time doesn’t suddenly make that not happen.”

  “But I swear I’m never going to cheat again,” Brandon said. For a moment—maybe three heartbeats—thinking about the way that Dean and I had hooked up the night before, and how appalled at myself I was at having an inadvertent one-night stand, I almost considered it. I almost thought about everything that I’d thrown away when I’d kicked Brandon out of my life. If nothing else, having him living with me had meant that we had enough to cover rent and then some. There had been stability there. And he’d been affectionate. Mostly.

  But he’d been cheating on me. And I couldn’t stand the thought of being fooled like that again. Especially when I’d had a glimmer of something that I thought could have actually been better than what I had with Brandon the night before. Dean had been a one-time thing but that didn’t mean there wasn’t someone else out there, willing to offer a lot of the same qualities. There couldn’t just be one guy like that in the entire world, could there? I would be happy to have the majority of the package without the billionaire status.

  “Tell it to the next woman you con into taking you on,” I told him, and then tapped end call. I found his number in my address book and opened up the contact menu, and blocked it. I couldn’t delete his number and also keep it blocked but I changed his name in my contacts list to ‘asshole’ and saved it. I thought about it a moment longer and went through all my social media, blocking him everywhere that I could. It took me all of two minutes, and at the end of it. I felt better than I had since waking up that morning.

  I sat back in my chair and closed my eyes. I didn’t know what I was going to do next but I knew that I was actually grateful for the night I’d shared with Dean. If I hadn’t slept with him, if I hadn’t encountered him the way that I had, then I might have given in to Brandon’s begging. I might have ended up curled up on the floor of the airport terminal and gotten the call while cold and miserable and sleep-deprived, and I might have been weak enough to take him back.

  Instead, I’d found out that there were better guys out there than Brandon, and that I didn’t need him—not even a little bit. I started thinking about an idea that I’d only begun entertaining when I’d left my ex the week before. As long as I’d been with Brandon, he’d insisted on me keeping my office job, and we’d argued about it at least a dozen times—with me pointing out that if I could make enough playing blackjack professionally, there was no point in keeping a day job, and Brandon insisting that without a day job I would have no stability.

  When I’d left him, kicked him out of the apartment, I’d started to think about taking the plunge. It was terrifying but exciting all at the same time. If I did it, then I wouldn’t have to worry about whether or not I had vacation time banked up to cover the days I would be at a tournament or a competition. If I went into playing blackjack full time, I could travel as much as I liked, provided I was able to make enough money to cover my expenses and travel.

  But then, just like Brandon had said, there was no stability in it. If I had a particularly spectacular defeat at a tournament, I’d lose money. If that happened again and again, I’d eventually have to get what my parents considered a “real” job to float myself and cover my rent and bills. But if I was as good as I thought I was, didn’t I owe it to myself to at least try, for a little while? Even just a year?

  It would have been easier if I could have convinced Brandon to let me do it while we were together. If that had been possible, I could have known that his job, at least, would cover the bills, and that if I took losses, I wouldn’t have to worry about being evicted. But now that I was single, I was free to try it, but also free to experience the consequences if I turned out to be totally wrong about my chances.

  I started going through hotel sites, through travel sites, on my phone, trying to figure out what I was going to do with myself. I couldn’t really face up to the idea of seeing Dean again. I’d deliberately tucked myself away somewhere that I didn’t think he would find me. But I hadn’t given up my key card either. Just in case there was nowhere for me to go, I’d figured that I could beg and plead for him to at least let me sleep on the big couch. That was assuming that he thought there was anything wrong with me disappearing in the morning and not showing up again for hours, but I was pretty sure he would find something very wrong in that. I’d have some explaining to do.

  I thought about the epiphany I’d had while talking to Brandon: that there were, in fact, plenty of men out there who were better than my ex, and that even on short acquaintance, Dean had been one of them. It had been so good with him, even in the short time we’d had, and it was hard not to imagine what it would be like to have actually stayed with him. To have let him wake up to see me on the couch, reading the news on my phone and sipping coffee, waiting for him to get up so we could order breakfast.

  Of course, being a billionaire, he’d be more than capable of supporting me financially if I went through with my hope of becoming a professional blackjack player. He wouldn’t even notice whatever amount I lost before I decided to give it up. But—I countered my own hopeful, wistful thoughts—he might not be okay with that at all. For all I’d seen his competitive streak, he might expect the woman he was seeing to be at his disposal all the time, to be a good little trophy. It was probably better that I never find out that that was the case, if it was. Better by far to just have the memory of a great night with a hot guy. No matter how much
I liked Dean, it was best for me to just put him out of my mind as even potentially being an option and move on with my life. Maybe someday I’d tell one of my friends about my crazy one-night stand with a billionaire and pull up his picture online to show them who he was; I was sure he’d be featured in some article, somewhere.

  But for the moment, I had to figure out what I was going to do with myself, and where I was going to go until I could get a flight back to my parents, even if my holiday with them seemed less appealing than ever.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Dean

  I started working on tracking Kayla down before I’d even finished my breakfast, making a call to the airport and opening up a few sites on my phone’s browser to try and see if there might be anywhere else in Omaha for her to stay. I hadn’t checked with the front desk yet—I wanted to save that disappointment for last—but by the time I was down to just sipping coffee, with about half the food I’d ordered in my stomach, I had a pretty good notion that there weren’t many places she could possibly be.

  I was just about to make another call, to check and see if Kayla had contacted anyone at the airport help desk when my phone buzzed with an incoming call. It was from Bill, the pilot of my plane.

  “Hey, what’s going on? I can’t stay on the phone long, Billy-my-man; I’m working on something,” I said, accepting the call quickly and speaking as soon as it connected.

  “I wanted to make a quick call and see how you might feel about leaving tonight, instead of tomorrow,” Bill said.

  I raised an eyebrow at that. “Tonight? What time are you thinking?” It was already almost eleven, and I didn’t have much to go home to in Montauk but if I couldn’t find Kayla then I knew I would rather have been at home than in the hotel, alone, thinking about her.

  “There’s a snow storm coming in right now,” Bill explained. “Seems like some effect from that is going to warm things up enough in the hours afterward to make it possible to take off.”

  “That’s handy,” I said, thinking for a moment. “When did you say that would be?”

  “We should have a takeoff window between seven and nine,” Bill said. “After that, it’ll get cold again until after dawn, and we’ll have to wait until about lunchtime to get clearance.”

  “Go ahead and make it happen,” I said. No matter what was going on with Kayla—if I could even find her—I might just as well get back to my place. If I could convince her to come with me, I knew we could have a good Christmas together. She hadn’t seemed particularly interested in spending the holiday with her family but I might have been reading that wrong. Otherwise, I could just let her have the room for the night, on her own, in comfort. That was assuming I’d be able to find her.

  “I’ll loop everyone in, and we’ll expect you around say, seven-thirty?”

  “Perfect,” I said. I hung up with him and decided to get my ass in high gear, trying to find Kayla. I checked with the airport, but no one had come forward to say that they were Kayla. That quashed that idea. and I decided to finally just make the damn call to the front desk.

  “Good morning,” the woman answering the phone said. “How can I help?”

  “Hi, this is Dean Pearson, in the Presidential Suite,” I said quickly, trying to keep my tone at least a little bit polite and pleasant. “I have someone else listed on the suite with me, and I was wondering if they’d turned in their key card or checked out?” I could feel my heart beating faster in my chest as I waited for the answer.

  “To the best of my knowledge, no, Mr. Pearson,” the woman said. “I’ve been here since about seven this morning, and I don’t remember anyone coming through. Let me check the system just to be sure.” Once again, I waited in an agony of impatience as I heard rattling keys and mouse-clicks.

  “Thanks for checking for me,” I said absently, trying to think of what I would do next. I would need to find Kayla soon, or I would be unable to have the talk I wanted to have with her at all. If I managed to track her down before the snowstorm, I could give her the choice: come with me to Montauk and I would guarantee her a flight anywhere she wanted to go after Christmas, or she could stay in the hotel and take her normal flight. I just wanted to know that I hadn’t lost my mind entirely, hadn’t lost my ability to read people. I needed some kind of closure.

  “I am seeing here that the card is still active,” the woman said. “If you want, we can page her?”

  “No, thank you,” I told the woman. I had an idea—it occurred to me all at once, bright as an LED light bulb flashing in my head. I might know where Kayla would be hanging out, if she hadn’t left the hotel. If I was right, I wanted to find her and track her down on my own. I didn’t want her to have the option of knowing I was looking for her. It might have been a bit unethical of me but I didn’t want her to be able to avoid me.

  I got dressed and slipped on a pair of shoes and made sure that I had my own key card and my wallet before I headed out to the elevator. There were only so many places that Kayla could be in the hotel, and I had to believe that she was still at the hotel. Surely, if she’d managed to move on somewhere else—at least, to another hotel or motel—she would have turned in her room key first? I supposed that she might have gone to the airport to try her luck, holding the key card in reserve in case she couldn’t get a last-minute flight in the same window I was going to take advantage of but that seemed like a much more complicated reasoning than was likely. If she’d left, surely, she would have turned in the card.

  I checked the gift shop and the bar first, looking around. Business in the hotel and casino was starting to pick up as lunchtime approached, and when I looked outside through one of the windows, I could see the first flurries of snow starting to come down. It would be too cold and miserable outside for anyone to want to brave it—and I hoped again that Kayla hadn’t already left. She wouldn’t want to come back in that weather, and I wouldn’t blame her for that. The weather was keeping everyone inside, and I thought it made it both easier and harder to try and find the woman I was looking for.

  My next stop was the casino, and I went from table to table, looking around, trying to catch as many faces as I could. All of the blackjack tables were busy but not a single one of them had Kayla as a player, no matter how many times I circled back in the expectation of just seeing her there. I looked at the slot machines in spite of the fact that I was pretty sure she would have rather dropped dead than seriously played one of them—she might have figured she needed to hide, though I couldn’t say what I might have done to give her that impression.

  I moved around the big casino area again and again, making sure I hadn’t managed to miss anyone, and then gave up on finding her there. She might have gone to the spa but I doubted that—I would check that part of the hotel last, I told myself, as I headed back through the bar toward the lobby. It was nearly as absurd to think that she was hiding in the lobby somehow but I had to eliminate it as a possibility before moving on.

  As it happened, I caught her just as she was leaving the lobby to go outside. She wore the same sweater and jeans and coat she’d been wearing the night before and was headed for the door at the opposite end of the lobby, to the great outdoors where the snow was starting to come down more heavily. For a second, I was frozen in place, just staring at her. I couldn’t convince myself to move; she was just as beautiful as I’d remembered, and I was so shocked at actually finding her that it was almost impossible to believe.

  The next moment though, I took off after her, managing to get to the door just as it closed, and then scrambling to get it open. “Kayla! Kayla!” I hurried outside into the biting cold, not even caring for the moment that I was not in any way dressed for that weather—I had to catch her before she could get in a cab, or decide to do something stupid like walk somewhere.

  She turned around and stared at me in shock. “What the hell? Why are you outside with no coat on, Dean?”

  I laughed and rolled my eyes, shivering even as I caught up to her. “Why are you outsid
e at all? It’s about to storm,” I said, as soon as I was within a few feet of her. “Why are you leaving?”

  “I... guess I thought I needed some fresh air,” Kayla said, shrugging. “I wasn’t even sure I was leaving. I just... didn’t want to sit around anymore.”

  I shook my head at that. The cold wind cut through my clothes and I wished that I’d at least grabbed my heavier coat from the room before going to look for Kayla. Of course, I hadn’t expected to find her going outside. I had expected her to still be inside the hotel.

  “Will you please take pity on me and come back inside the hotel then?” I gestured to the doors.

  “You can go back inside, if you want,” Kayla pointed out.

  “I do want to, but I want to go back inside with you,” I said. “I want to talk to you.”

  Kayla looked doubtful for a moment, glancing from the hotel to me. “What about?”

  I smiled at her even as my teeth started to chatter harder. “It’s kind of a long thing. I can’t tell you it all here unless you want to watch me die of hypothermia. Can you just come inside with me, and hear what I have to say? If you want to leave the hotel then…” It was snowing more heavily. “Well, you probably wouldn’t have had much of a chance to leave now, either. But I’ll leave you alone, if you want.”

  Kayla looked at me for a moment that felt like it was a good five minutes long and then nodded.

  “I’ll hear you out,” she said, smiling slightly. “I owe you at least that and I don’t want you to die of cold.” She started back toward the hotel and I had never been more grateful for automatic doors in my entire life. We both stepped through them and I moaned in pleasure at the feeling of the heated air hitting my chilled body. If I’d been out there much longer, I might have been in real danger.